GumbyTwoStep.6109

Few years late to this party but I'm wondering if there is any legitimate reason we can't have both male/female varieties of the Bear/Raven Ceremonial Armors on each gender? I want the male versions on female characters. Will name my firstborn child after the dev that makes this happen. That is all.

I don't have any concrete worries currently. It was more so just about how their regime has changed several times over the last few years (Game Directors coming and going etc) and they never really seemed to have a proper set in stone idea of what they wanted the game to be. So every couple years it seemed like the fundamental design would change. I'm just wondering if this current iteration will fall under the same umbrella or if this will stick around for a while. No panic yet lol.

GOOD 1. I am a huge fan of the current business model and cadence so far and the size of this first release was much more than I was expecting. I hope this trend continues. 2. The lore we got from this expansion is bar-none the best I've seen in Guild Wars 2. Being free of the Dragon storyline (and all your typical allies and their emotional baggage) is the biggest blessing this game has ever received. It feels like a brand-new game. The mood/tone is much darker and serious like Guild Wars 1 was. We still have a fair amount of overly breathy and drawn-out dialogue though (ex: Aurene, Peitha, characters like this that seem to speak in slow motion for dramatic effect) but I'll make my peace with that if it means we get lore like this first release more often. The last few releases prior to SotO I was excited for, but I always knew in the back of my head that I have never really felt that joy from GW2 releases from a lore standpoint because none of the long-standing mysteries or storylines were ever being explored. I am very pleased to say that SotO finally brought back that joy that I got from way back in the GW1 days when the lore was more interesting and grand and less about dealing with emotional trauma. We get it, ArenaNet knows how to write about emotions. I'm glad we have finally begun to break into more interesting topics. You can really tell that the mood has changed. I don't know how much of this story was built long ago vs in the last few months, but the story they laid out actually feels like they knew what they we're doing, even if the connections they made weren't part of the original plan. Like the Deimos connection for instance - that could have easily gone undone and we could have never heard from Deimos again and he could have just stayed a mystery forever, but they actually weaved him into another storyline and developed some backstory. It gave true meaning to the world building and didn't just feel like this was another release with no connections to any prior release. This was incalculably great to see. I want more of this. Connect older stories so that the game feels like an actual universe and not just a mess of unrelated inconsequential stories. 3. The maps, albeit a fair amount of asset re-use, are beautiful. The verticality that we haven't seen much of since HoT has returned. The maps feel big even with the use of mounts and this is something that hasn't been felt in a while. EoD maps feel very small because the verticality isn't there and mounts can just zoom you from one side of the map to the other in seconds. You can still do this in SotO maps but the added verticality really slows you down, which is a good thing. I understand it for this expansion, but going forward I would really like to see less 'in the sky or in a random area of the ocean' maps and more on land on Tyria maps that expand the unexplored regions of the map. BAD 1. The whispers from various characters while you're playing in open world PvE get pretty annoying. At the very least could they be changed to not be whispers so that the little whisper ping noise doesn't go off every few seconds? 2. BUGS- There are A LOT of bugs with various achievements or event progression in the maps which block progress on achievements. More and more of these have been getting fixed so while the bugs being present are unfortunate, I am confident they will be fixed in time. I do wish that the bugs CONTINUE to be fixed though, and not just fixed until the negative chatter from the community subsides. Some other bugs in the game both big and small have existed for literal years (see Valdhertz Crypt) and I sincerely hope that the plan of attack is not just "don't include it in anything important so we don't have to fix it". Whether the bugs are new or old, they need to be consistently fixed as they come along. Bug fixing has been a very large problem for ArenaNet for several years now and its very evident that they either don't have the resources/time they need, or they just outright refuse to polish and fix older content. The norm shouldn't be to fix things when the community starts whining about it. The norm should be fixing things even if only a select few know of the existence of such bugs. Again, maybe this is just a time/money problem, but it just looks really bad on ArenaNet when some very public bugs have been in the game for YEARS without being fixed. It just makes it seem like they don't know what they're doing. 3. The required repetition of events for different achievements is obnoxious. There are at least 3 separate achievements that force you to do some or all events in the Amnytas bastions multiple times over. For example: Oblige Obscure - complete all events in the Bastion of the Obscure - 3AP. Ok, fine no problem. Then when you finish that you unlock Omnipresent Oblige Obscure - 3AP DO IT ALL AGAIN, but not just once through...at least TWICE through the chain to cover all 3AP. This would not be an issue if there was simply no achievement points tied to the repeatable achievement. As an achievement hunter this kind of thing is incredibly frustrating and almost degrading in a sense as the amount of AP you get for these is so miniscule. But wait! There's more! Then after you've finished the repeatable achievement we're finally done right?! No, then you come across other achievements like Sorrow's Lost, which while they don't inherently force you to do the entire Bastion event chain again, require specific parts of the chain, some of which don't spawn unless a prior part of the chain is completed, so essentially, you're doing the whole chain again. This is more or less the 4th time you've done these same events for various achievements. Please stop this. It is pretty obvious you're just trying to stretch out the amount of time it takes to finish everything so the expansion feels bigger than it is. 4. There are tooltips in the Knowledge of the Elders sub-achievement progression that are just factually wrong. "Craft Essence of X at the Legendary Smith in the Wizards Tower" No, he doesn't craft them. You actually get them from Faction Provisioners in each corresponding bastion. This is not the only instance of these issues either. That's cool I guess. I mean what are tooltips for if not to lie to me. Kidding aside, I'm sure this will be fixed easily enough. 5. RIFTS - Literally anything and everything about them is awful. I'll start with the amount of currency you get for doing them. The time spent vs the amount you get and the amount you NEED for various achievements/gear is laughable. For this to be tied to PvE Legendary Armor which was designed so that the average player didn't have to go through Raids/PvP/WvW to obtain it, it feels like an extreme amount of work to get what you need. The Raid route in particular is extraordinarily easier, cheaper, and faster overall. It seems counter-intuitive to me if the goal was to make Legendary Armor more widely obtainable. T1 rifts give you next to nothing and feel like they aren't worth doing. Great they're solo-able. T2 and T3 require either crafting or buying an extremely expensive consumable to get access to higher tier essences. Even with the Rift-Mastery which gives you more essence for closing rifts, I still feel like I'm being shafted. I feel like T3 rifts need to reward all 3 essence types so that they end up being the most rewarding for the time/gold spent. Rifts are not anywhere near exciting or fun enough to be this much of a grind. The cost of materials for T2/3 rift openers is simply not worth the reward you get from them. By being this way, it is actively coercing people into mooching off other players instead of making their own openers. This is quite backwards to me. The fact that you need to physically search for the next rift every single time you do one is kind of lame also. Could we not just have it be automatically done? What is the point of having to channel the Heart of the Obscure every time? Or alternatively, could we just not have to run clear across the map every single time we want to open a rift? I could deal with channeling a new rift if I didn't have to spend 2 minutes skyscaling my way across the map to the next one. Like maybe if I finish a rift in one location, I could just open another one right there instead, which would boost the rate that you could farm them and could in turn increase the rewards per hour you're getting from them making them feel a little less horrible? I still don't feel like that's the ideal solution, but it would be a start. I think at the end of the day either rifts just need to be more fun to do or they need to be more rewarding to do. Maybe include some raw gold as a reward for doing them in addition to the essences, to help support the cost of the materials you need to make the openers. The rewards from the 'Weekly Rift Hunting' achievements feel much more in line with what I would expect rifts to give me. Maybe they could just make this the norm instead of isolating these rewards to that one weekly achievement. I feel like Rifts were just that thing that they had to create so they could say "Look at this new game type we made!" much like dungeons, fractals, strike missions, raids, dragon response missions, etc have done in the past, because it is more exciting to say NEW WAYS TO PLAY instead of HERES A NEW OLD THING YOU"VE BEEN DOING. Rifts just simply are not polished enough to stand the test of time or to be anything more than that thing I have to play to finish these particular achievements. I think they should go back to the drawing board on this one. 6. Somehow, the release of the expansion broke just about every Fractal Challenge Mode in existence. Not really even sure what to say about this. UGLY 1. The performance issues in the Amnytas map are unacceptable. To have your frame rate get cut in half for doing something as simple as looking in a particular direction is ridiculous and cannot be ignored. I have seen multiple posts on this issue, but nowhere have I seen any developers acknowledge that the issue exists and that they are working on it. I'm not sure how big or small the fix would be but regardless of that, it absolutely cannot go unfixed. This was a paid expansion. -------------- Overall, the expansion has a lot of ups and downs. I personally find this expansion to be the best release since Heart of Thorns, but that is mostly just due to the lore that I have been waiting on since before the game's existence. With all the issues that come along with it, I would currently set SotO somewhere around a 6/10. They definitely took steps in the right direction, but there is still a lot of work to be done and I still wonder if the current business model will stand the test of time or if it will fall apart like much of the prior models. And obviously there are plenty more specifics and issues in the expansion, but I just wanted to hit what I thought we're some of the biggest bullet points that needed to be dealt with. Thank you for reading.

Did we ever get an idea on this or is the drop rate just one of those "anet infusion-level" drop rates?

Noted, I will check on these updates. Thanks.

NEW KAINENG CITY Cleanup Duty - At least one of the graffiti's do not have an interact option, stalling this achievement entirely. - As stated on the wiki, some graffiti's exist without showing. Can be completed. Ocean-Fresh Sashimi - Been playing expansion since launch, have never encountered this Delivery event. Not sure if it even exists/triggers. Does actually exist, seems like South event starts first then North event follows it. ECHOVALD WILDS What Did the Shrine Guardians Say? - All the rock based chests do not spawn chests when you pick up the rock (I know this one is already being looked at, was supposed to be fixed after the last patch but wasn't actually fixed) - FIXED as of 4/20/22 DRAGON'S END Tsunami Dodger - Haven't tried this since the first day after they said they fixed it, but it still didn't work then. Haven't seen any updates on it so I assume it still doesn't work. SPECIALIZATION COLLECTIONS Purifier - Willbender's Stamp & Willbender's Authorization Papers don't drop upon completion of the metas that they're supposed to drop from. Willbender's Trinket doesn't seem to be dropping from Aetherblade enemies in Echovald either. Percussive Maintenance - Mechanist's Stamp doesnt drop from the meta it is supposed to drop from. Possession - Specter's Stamp doesn't drop from the meta it is supposed to drop from. ^ All of these just need to be done as the first meta of the day, meaning you cannot do the same meta twice in one reset. I have finished all AP aside from this with either no issues or while using small workarounds to get them done. I'm sure there may be others lurking around or new ones that have sprung up since I have completed other achievements but this is just what I currently have left that is not able to be finished in its current state. Special mention to Avid/Saltwater Fisher and Avid/World Class Fisher achievements: These are not bugged, but the drop rates are absolutely horrendous and a massive waste of time at the moment. I would like to see them either given better drop rates or given a specific fishing hole that you can finish them in so that you're not just sitting there for days on end in random spots hoping. Fishing is not a fun activity and should not be gated like this. It's bad enough that Fishing as a whole was given some of the highest achievement point totals we've seen since Heart of Thorns days, but to gate an activity like that which is basically turning players into bots to such an extent is utterly ridiculous. Something needs to be done about these 2 collections specifically. I have finished every other collection twice-over and still haven't completed Saltwater Fisher once. That is insane.

Can confirm, still bugged post-patch 3/29.